Nature's Narratives

Did you know male nightingales can sing nearly 1,200 distinct notes—the most of any bird species? Their songbook includes buzz sounds, which indicate good health, as well as tunes that pitch their parenting skills to prospective mates. Male nightingales sing so often, in fact, that it causes them to lose weight.

I learned about these nocturnal crooners in science writer Janaki Lenin’s fabulous 2020 essay collection, Every Creature Has a Story, which explains unique evolutionary behaviors and characteristics in the animal kingdom. Other topics covered in the book include cancer-suppressing genes in elephants, the telephoto eyes of chameleons, and my personal favorite, the ant-gathering techniques of chimpanzees, in which the apes hang from trees to avoid getting bit and fish out the snacky little insects with long sticks.

I was reminded of Lenin’s essays while working on this issue of MCV, which highlights a bunch of cool animal behaviors, from the ability of female black bears to “pause” their pregnancies to the burrowing habits of turtles. In “Signs of Life," Volunteer deputy editor Keith Goetzman expands on Lenin’s notion that every plant and animal has a story to tell human observers. The article unpacks the concept of the indicator species, “an organism whose presence, absence, or abundance can tell us something—about their habitat, about  the climate, about air or water quality, even about how our own actions affect the environment,” writes Goetzman.

“Signs of Life” is a reminder that plants and animals don’t exist in a vacuum—that they affect, and are affected by, the world around them. Leadplants, for example, can signal that you’re in a remnant prairie. The presence of snaketail dragonflies in rivers and streams, meanwhile, might indicate that these waters are clean and healthy.

It sounds trite to say that all life is connected, but when you unpack that idea—whether in this magazine or elsewhere—it reveals itself as a deep and urgent truth. As Goetzman states in his article, almost all the scientists he interviewed “took the discussion beyond single species to communities of species, to surrounding habitats and landscapes, to natural and human history—the whole complex web of life itself.”